Fuddland

After having a pretty light schedule for the last six months or so, it’s been a fairly busy month or two as I picked up several part-time teaching gigs, mostly at summer schools for kids and teens. With the more strictly-enforced visa restrictions causing problems for a vast swathe of the foreigners who have been, up to now, able to enjoy relative freedom in where they worked, those of us who were lucky enough to have the right kind of visa are much in demand, and it has really been a case of me deciding how busy I wanted to be.

One summer school is just four boys between the ages of 8 and 11, three afternoons a week, which is easy and fun: a bit of reading, a bit of practising-short-talks-to-impress-grandparents, and a good smattering of games.

My approach is to try and make these things as laid-back as possible, to give the kids a chance to enjoy their summer holidays despite being forced to attend classes by their evil parents. My crowning achievement [teaching-wise] is to get them to look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. At the beginning of the course these kids would read aloud until they got to a new word and just stop dead, look up at me and expect me to provide them with the pronunciation and meaning. I was happy to do this for a while, but eventually they needed to realise that Teacher David isn’t always going to be around and it’s useful to be able to check definitions and pronunciations themselves. [Since they learn English as a foreign language at school, they’re all entirely familiar with the phonetic alphabet (unlike me).] It took me three lessons to get them all to remember to bring dictionaries, but now they look words up without prompting. This might not sound like much but it’s a skill that bewilderingly lacks in most students I come across, adults as well as children.

One of their favourite games is one in which I write new words up on the board, and call out the definitions of them. The students line up two at a time at the other end of the classroom and have to race to the board and be the first to touch the word that matches the definition. Being boys, they tear down the room at worrying rates, each trying to trip or otherwise impede the other before crashing into the wall, often randomly hitting the board until they land on the right word. It’s hugely entertaining for me as well as them. I think I might try it with an adult class next time things are getting a bit boring.

Summer has hit Sūzhōu (苏州) with its full force, which means several days of sweltering heat [pushing 40°C] followed by torrential rainstorms which, although a welcome break from the sun, turn the streets into dirty rivers and bring sticky humidity when the temperatures rise again the following day. It’s a far cry from the refreshing change of the final week of my holiday a few months back, which I spent on the southernmost shores of the southernmost part of China, the provincial island of Hǎinán (海南).

I admit I was fairly dubious about visiting a beach resort out here, and while it wasn’t quite up to the standards I’ve seen while visiting Nantucket or Cancun, the water was clean enough, and the beaches were kept rubbish-free despite the generally carefree Chinese attitude to littering. [Some days it’s all I can do to pick up the sweet wrapper that the kids in front of me have just thrown on the ground and thrust it back into their hands, but then a street-cleaner usually sweeps it away before I have a chance to move. This obviously works for them, but for someone with a deep-ingrained aversion to dropping litter, the lack of convenient bins every few hundred metres means I sometimes walk for miles with a sticky ice-cream wrapper flapping about in my hand.]

All along the south-east shores of the town of Sānyà (三亚) are lavish hotels and resorts with private beaches, but being a man on a budget I stayed in the Dàdōnghǎi (大东海) area, home to two youth hostels, the better of which I found to be the Blue Sky International Youth Hostel. It was right around the corner from a very nice stretch of beach, with plenty of restaurants overlooking the sea and lots of street vendors peddling deliciously fresh fruit — I’ve never tasted better mangos.

The area is apparently astoundingly popular with Russian holidaymakers — so much so that most of the shops and roadsigns are displayed in both Chinese and Russian, although a Ukrainian woman that I met at the hostel told me that the Russian was mostly as amusingly wrong as much of the Chinglish that can be seen all over the country.

Walk a few hundred yards away from this vibrant, luxurious district and you find several huge hotels that have gone out of business. It was quite eerie walking around these deserted places, which looked as though everyone had simply walked out one day and never come back: through the padlocked glass doors, I could see plants that had wilted and died in the lobby, newspapers on the coffee tables; the adjacent restaurants still had their tables and chairs set out. [I half-expected the Chinese name of the hotel to translate as Mary Celeste.] A large smelly skip was thankfully downwind from the currently-populated areas.

Between these two areas were small groups of local fisherman, whole families catching crabs and molluscs, and — to be expected — more than a few wedding photo sessions taking advantage of the scenic backdrops. Despite not being much of a beach person, I did enjoy my week or so walking with the soft sand between my toes, my breakfasts of coconut jam on toast, and the surreal experience of Chinese taxi drivers and waiters trying to speak to me in Russian.

For my Chinese homework last week, I had to write out one of my favourite recipes from my home nation. Seeing as though the lack of an oven out here prevents me from enjoying a good old home-made Shepherd’s Pie, let alone a Sunday Roast, I thought I’d introduce my teacher to the delights of my delicious chilli, which of course is a traditional British dish first cooked by Sir Jeffrey Chilli of Chilli-on-the-Wold in 1423.

大卫的墨西哥辣味牛肉

原料：

绞细牛肉500克
一半洋葱 （剥皮的）
三~五瓣大蒜 （剥皮的）
一罐四季豆（420克）
红辣椒（按口味）
枯茗子
三~四西红柿
一罐浓缩番茄酱（150克左右）
盐

准备：

先把蔬菜洗干净，把四季豆洗净。把洋葱、大蒜、红辣椒切成小块儿。

方法：

把火点着，把锅放在火上，马上把牛肉放进锅里。 是对的，没有油！所以， 很重要你立刻用铲子炒一炒。在炒一炒以前牛肉变成褐色的。把洋葱、大蒜、红辣椒放进锅里， 炒一炒。 把切好的西红柿放进锅里，把枯茗子、盐倒进锅里， 用铲子搅拌均匀，把锅盖放到锅上。 等5分钟左右。

把四季豆、浓缩番茄酱放成锅里，搅拌均匀。把锅盖放到锅上，煨30分钟左右。偶尔搅拌。

跟米饭吃。

The Chinese is by no means perfect, and I’m relying heavily on the dictionary giving me the correct translations for cumin and kidney beans, so I’m accepting no responsibility for any culinary disasters that may result from any Chinese-speakers following the above recipe. For non-Chinese speakers, you should have no problems at all following the Google automated translation of this page.

Waiting for the bus after teaching the other day, I suddenly noticed a small family of goats munching on the hedges of the central reservation. I really couldn’t have better planned the sudden appearance of the goatherd.

Whenever I need a bit of cheering up, I play this movie I made at the kindergarten at which I used to teach.

One of the must-dos in the province of Guǎngxī (广西) is a leisurely cruise down the Lí River (漓江) from Guìlín (桂林) to Yángshuò (阳朔), taking in 83 kilometres worth of the renowned karst scenery. The weather was not totally on our side, presenting us with a rather overcast day, but it was still a lovely way to spend five-or-so hours.

A coach picked us up from our hostel and stopped off at a couple of other nearby hotels to collect the other members of this particular scheduled cruise. Once we were all aboard and on our way to the pier, we were given a brief history of the region by the tour guide, but the most entertaining thing he said was when, since lunch on the boat was part of package, he enquired if there were any vegetarians on board. Several people raised there hands, only to be told:

Okay, can you tell me who you are again when it’s time for lunch? All foreigners look the same to me.

[Aside: this appears to be genuinely true and not an intentionally ironic twist on the racist stereotypes displayed in many a terrible British sitcom from the 1970s; several other Chinese people have told me they have a hard time distinguishing many Western people from each other. Mary explained to me that this is because although people of East Asian descent generally all have straight, black hair and brown eyes, they have a much wider variation in their facial features — the width and positioning of their eyes, the length of their noses, and so on — than Caucasians. So whilst people of European descent are conditioned to use the visual clues of hair and eye colours when recognising others, if those aspects are subconsciously disregarded, there’s a lot less to distinguish one Caucasian from another.]

The journey took us past some imaginatively- and not-so-imaginatively-named rock formations such as Yearning for Husband Rock, the Painted Hill of Nine Horses, and Writing Brush Peak, and there was a sublime moment of comic timing when, just as we were tucking into our lunch below deck, our guide informed us that we were about to glide past the most famous of all the Lí River vistas — the one that appears on the back of the ¥20 note.

The cruise ends at the town of Yángshuò, which these days is entirely given over to tourism: literally every place of business is either a travel agent, restaurant, cafe, bar, hotel, souvenir shop or some such establishment. There were more eating places specialising in Western food than Chinese cuisine, and at night the main streets are garishly lit with ill-thought-out neon, waging war on your eyes while your ears are similarly assaulted by the clash of dance music pumping out of every bar. That’s not to say these places are all dreadful — the Karst Cafe and Drifters Cafe both had good food and wine, and we sampled the Rosewood Cafe’s ice cream menu a couple too many times. My two-years-in-China anniversary on February the 17th was celebrated with Shepherd’s Pie, apple crumble, and a nice bottle of French red — not a particularly Chinese meal but delicious nonetheless. But the real reason to spend any time at all in Yángshuò is to visit the surrounding countryside.

I think most people hire bicycles, but we opted for what we thought would be the easier option of an electric scooter. [For the benefit of any parents who might be reading, let’s all pretend that, yes, of course helmets were provided.] We asked what the best direction to head was, jumped on, and away we went.

Now excuse me while I gush: whizzing along the roads through the undulating countryside — karst after karst towering over small plots of farmland; passing through small villages and townships — with Mary riding pillion, her hands tucked into my coat pockets for warmth, her face pressed against my back as she too admired the scenery, is simply one of my happiest memories of the past thirty-one years. Even though the battery ran out of juice earlier than we estimated because we kept going further and further out and, despite stopping for a late lunch at a roadside noodle place and borrowing their electricity to charge it up for an hour, we ended up having to push the scooter for about 10 kilometres back to Yángshuò, in the dark and the rain, and I was a cranky old so-and-so for most of this time, thinking about that day gives me a goofy little smile that I have no intention of hiding.